'Talmud Torah' in modern Jewish thought: Martin Buber and the renewal of text-centered Judaism

This dissertation considers, through the lens of modern Jewish thought, the place of Jewish knowledge in the life of modern, secularized Jews. The traditional community revolved around the Torah and its study. The Torah was considered the inexhaustible source of all truth, knowledge and values. Studying the Torah, Talmud Torah, served a normative function---it derived Jewish law---but was also valued as a process, a spiritual act and religious experience on par with prayer. The humanistic and universalistic worldview adopted by modernizing Jews through the Enlightenment challenged the particularistic epistemology of traditional Judaism. Judaism no longer had an exclusive claim to truth, and Jews sought universal validation for their values and beliefs. Thus, the concept of what comprised an 'educated Jew' underwent a radical change, Talmud Torah ceased being a primary Jewish value and the Jewish community ceased to be text-centered. Around the turn of the twentieth century, as both the success of assimilation and growing persecution sent many Jews on a quest for Jewish identity, Martin Buber proposed a new, existential, yet secularized return to the text as the means of revivifying Jewish spirituality and identity.;This study will present an intellectual history of modern, post-traditional Talmud Torah: after a schematic discussion of Torah study's role and nature in rabbinic Judaism and its decline through the process of Jewish modernization, acculturation and secularization, it will consider, through the example of Buber's pioneering work, efforts in modern Jewish thought to build upon and augment the rabbinic model in order to create a new typology for Jewish renewal. Buber conceived of new Jewish learning, independent of any other beliefs or practice and open to the influence of the entire scope of human knowledge, as crucial to the secularized Jew's negotiation of modernity and tradition.